Blog

Rugged Tablets are Smoothing Out Massive Road Improvement Projects

Sep 05, 2017

by Brett Gross

It
doesn’t matter if you’re reading this from Australia or somewhere in Latin
America, the United States or the United Kingdom, you can appreciate the
frustration that daily drivers face when roads are in disrepair – or under
constant repair. That is why I think you’ll appreciate
what Main Roads Western Australia is doing to keep one of the most widely
geographically distributed road networks in the world in top shape for the
millions of people and billions of dollars and goods that traverse the region
every day.

As
the State road authority, Main Roads WA is responsible for building, inspecting
and maintaining more than 18,500 kilometres (nearly 11,500 miles) of main roads
and highways covering over 2.5 million square kilometres (>1.5 million
miles). No easy feat by anyone’s standards. Yet, this government-affiliated
agency has found a way to simplify one of the most complex jobs in the public
sector while simultaneously raising the bar for road quality standards for the
world using just rugged tablets.

(Not So Fun) Fact
Over the last five years,
AAA found that damaged roads have cost U.S. drivers $15 billion in vehicle repairs, or approximately $3 billion annually. The average driver reported spending $300 to repair pothole damage to their vehicle and many reported having to make repairs an average of three times in the last five years.

About five years ago, each Main Roads WA regional office was
using their own system to document road inspections and track repair progress.
The problem was, most of these systems were heavily reliant on paper-based
documents or Toughbook notebooks that could not be safely mounted in vehicles.
Considering the sheer number of resources it requires to coordinate field-based
teams, much less execute and track the high volume of projects in the works on
any given day, these legacy “systems” were failing fast.

After doing their research about alternative
technology-based workflow solutions and conducting extensive field tests, Main
Roads WA realized that rugged tablet-based solutions were the best way forward.
By giving every worker an Xplore rugged tablet, this transport authority was
able to migrate its seven regional offices onto the same agency-wide workflow
system. Everyone was able to login to the same software applications to manage
assets, record, track road maintenance issues, and retrieve job requirements,
whether they were on site, on the road or in the office. By using mobile
technology to directly improve the quality of their data management, Main Roads
was able to improve the performance of their Maintenance and Inspection
Management Systems and, therefore, improve the quality of their roads.

They are a great model for every public and private sector
organization to follow, especially those with highly mobile workforces charged
with managing disparate transportation fleets or infrastructure assets. It is
highly inefficient and certainly not cost-effective to invest in multiple
devices, and therefore multiple software platforms and configurations, to
deliver critical workflows to every employee and job site. You wouldn’t give
one employee two different desktop computers, so why give them multiple
computers at all?

As Main Roads WA can advocate, today’s
government,
transportation
and field-based agencies need a single mobile computing platform for workflow continuity
between the traditional office, the vehicle and the field. Now, that requires
some strategy and planning, as not all mobile computers are going to be
well-suited for your workflow software. And, there are always
other considerations when deploying mobile technology “on the road”; safety being the primary one, as
Main Roads WA emphasized in
their interview. (We’ll discuss all of these considerations in a webinar with Field
Technologies Online on 21 September.
Register now.)

However, with the right mobile tools in place, both
government-affiliated organizations and private sector companies can improve worker productivity
– which accelerates project timelines, making your customers happy – and
eliminate wasteful operational expenditures, which is especially critical when
taxpayer dollars are driving these projects.

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